24 February 2015
The Novel and Psychology:
Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
Professor Belinda Jack
In my last lecture – the third of four on the novel and its extraordinary bagginess – I explored the degree to which the genre of the novel allows for explorations of idealistic or utopian ideas, ideas about how we might better organise ourselves as social beings. Idealist and Utopian novels imagine other ways of living as social beings and in imagining them make it possible, perhaps, for radical change. The lecture was based on the nineteenth-century French woman writer George Sand and her novel, François le Champi (The Country Waif, 1848). Before that we considered the capacity of the novel to allow for explorations of political history. This was based on the writings of another French novelist, Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pseudonym of Stendhal. The focus was on his novel, Le rouge et le noir (The red and the Black, 1830). And in the first of the four lectures on the novel I discussed Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759). Johnson’s working title had been ‘The Choice of Life’ and I analysed it in terms of its capacity to explore what I called the ‘morality of happiness’. Is it incumbent on us to try to find a life that makes us happy? Tonight, in my final lecture on the novel, I’d like to consider the genre as a vehicle for the exploration of human psychology.
As a very loose definition of ‘psychology’ I’d like to propose this: ‘the means of exploring ideas, feelings and behaviours.’ Most novels are about people in a social setting and this is certainly true of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and in exploring how individuals function in a group, psychology will almost necessarily form part of the writing. It has been argued, however, that Wharton’s novels are better described primarily as social satires. It is her short stories, it has been claimed, that provide the great psychological insights. This is Carol Singley in a double review of a Wharton biography (by Shari Benstock) and a book about Wharton and WWI (by Alan Price): ‘Her fiction is Janus-faced: her social satires fill the "large canvas of the novels," whereas her explorations of the inner life, of psychology and parapsychology, fill the "smaller canvases of short stories" (p. 243). Throughout her career, Wharton shifted between these two forms of writing, chronicling the social scene while simultaneously penetrating its members' inner lives.’ [No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton by Shari Benstock; The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War by Alan Price Review by: Carol Singley, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Mar., 1999), pp. 153-157]
In one of my introductory lectures in my first year as Gresham Professor I sounded words of caution about books and courses that claim to be able to teach novel-writing, particularly those – the majority – that treat certain aspects of the novel as discrete elements, typically: character, plot, setting, point of view,and theme. To distinguish ‘the social scene’ and ‘members’ inner lives’, as Singley does in the review I just quoted from is, in my view, equally mistaken. At the risk of mixing my metaphors – I have proposed the novel as a capacious sack – I’d now like to suggest that it is also a Gordian Knot, the proverbial intricate knot which is impossible to untie because one end is hidden. Great novels do not allow the constituent elements which I just proposed, to be detached one from another. This evening I’d like to argue that in a novel like The Age of Innocence (and I’ll refer to a couple of others) Wharton provides both acute social satire and very modern insights into the human psychology of the members of that society – and the two are inextricably part and parcel of each other. This is because the categories of ‘place’ and ‘person’ are fused. But before I begin that argument – which is a complex one – and illustrate it, I think it’s useful to give a brief account of Wharton’s life and a number of descriptions of the novel for those of you who may not yet have had a chance to read it.
Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones in New York on January 24, 1862. [Image 2] She died in Saint-Brice-sous-Fôret, near Paris, in 1937. She was seventy-five. [gloss my absurd obsession with length of a life]. Her family was essentially ‘quasi-new-aristocratic’, distinguished and thus well-connected, long-established, wealthy and New York. She was educated by private tutors and governesses at home and in Europe, where the family moved for six years after the American Civil War (1861-65). She was a voracious reader. She made her debut in society in 1879, aged seventeen [age again], and married Edward Wharton [image 3], a wealthy Boston banker, in 1885. He was 12 years older than she was, from a grand Boston family. He was a sportsman and from a similarly confident social class. They both enjoyed travel. But a few years into the marriage Edward started to suffer from serious depression. By 1902 it had developed into a chronic mental disorder and was deemed incurable. That same year Wharton fell in love with the promiscuous Morton Fullerton [image 4] who was a correspondent for the London Times. In Morton she found an intellectual companion who shared her interest in writing. Their affair only lasted three years.
Although she had had a book of her own poems privately printed when she was 16 – her mother’s attempt to get writing out of her system - it was not until years later that she began to take writing seriously, that’s to say to write in the disciplined way that almost all novelists eventually adopt. She was influenced above all by her fellow American writer and friend, Henry James [image 5] (who had introduced her to Fullerton), their work shows shared concern for artistic form and the exploration of ethical dilemnas. She contributed a few poems and stories toHarper’s,Scribner’s,and other magazines in the 1890s. Her next books were collections of short stories,The Greater Inclination(1899) andCrucial Instances(1901).
In 1902 Wharton published her firstnovel,The Valley of Decision and, three years later, The House of Mirth. The latter bears some resemblance to The Age of Innocence being a detailed analysis of the hierarchical and repressive society in which she herself grew up. It won her wide critical acclaim and an audience keen to read more of her. Her career as a novelist really took off. In the next two decades she wrote novels including The Reef(1912),The Custom of the Country(1913),Summer (1917), andThe Age of Innocence(1920), which won aPulitzer Prize.
So why, in 1919 (when Wharton started The Age of Innocence ) was she intent on looking back fifty or so years to her childhood in New York? Wharton spoke of the venture as a retreat ‘to childish memories of a long-vanished America’, and a desire for ‘momentary escape’. But this looking back is barely indicative of a nostalgic desire, nor of a an intention to write an historical novel, although like Stendhal’s The Red and the Black the novel does give us a keen sense of what it might have been like to live in the upper echelons of Old New York in the 1870s. Edith Wharton’s working title had been Old New York and she was living in Paris at the time (and where she had been permanently resident from 1909), organising institutions to feed, clothe, and shelter the refugees who were pouring into the capital. This was 1919 and the Allied forces were remaking the map of Europe. What she was observing at first hand was individuals’ relationships with place. And what The Age of Innocence explores is just this. She is looking back to ‘Old New York’ not with naïve nostalgia but because it provides the richest and most familiar context in which to consider the interactions of the self and place which, as I said earlier, she writes about as an inseparable pair. So what is the novel about?
The Age of Innocencepresents a picture of upper-class New York society in the 1870s by means of an intractable three-way relationship between Newland Archer, the protagonist [image 6], May Welland [image 7], a beautiful fellow member of the grand society of New York and Ellen Olenska [image 8], May’s cousin. [Images from The Age of Innocenceis a 1993 Americanfilm adaptationofEdith Wharton's 1920novel of the same name. The film was released byColumbia Pictures, and starsDaniel Day-Lewis,Michelle Pfeiffer, andWinona Ryder]. Ellen is a former member of their social circle who has returned to New York after a disastrous marriage to a Polish nobleman, Count Olenska. Newland falls deeply in love with Ellen but neither he nor Ellen is capable of breaking out of the conventions and taboos of their society and its times. Newland feels compelled to renounce Ellen and marry May. So it is at once a love story and a brilliant examination of the snobbery and hypocrisy of a wealthy elite.
I think it’s worth providing some additional accounts of the novel from contemporary reviews as these give us some insight into how the novel was read when it was first published. As I said in one of my lectures on reading last year, reading is an act of engagement which is largely ephemeral and which is unique. We know this from our re-reading of novels; they seem to have changed in the interim. [gloss further?] So how did Wharton’s contemporaries engage with her novel?
Here is one which, in my view, is a mis-reading, in terms of its conclusion at least:
A young man, Newland Archer, belonging to the inner stock, the real thing, finds himself in conflict with the traditions that have made him – in conflict, that is to say, with a very large part of himself. His traditions, working with the smoothness of long practice, draw him remorselessly into the discreet, distinguished, airless world of his kind, into a sound profession and an unsuitable marriage; while the strain of rebellion pulls on the other side towards freedom, pulls violently, but at last has to own itself beaten. It is easier for a stranger to get into the guarded enclosure, after all, than for a native to get out of it. For Archer freedom means Ellen Olenska, a member of the family party like himself, but one who has vividly (and also disastrously) succeeded in detaching herself, and who has returned to it for support and consolation after her wandering.
And the critic goes on to write – and this is where I think a mis-reading takes place:
‘Ellen is exquisite, and she and Archer are both of them much too intelligent to underrate the virtue and the dignity of the forces opposed to them; the old order, in its way, is perfectly just and reasonable, its standards are honourable; two intelligent beings can only in the end respect them.’ [Reviews, Norton ed., p.396]
What I want to argue, as I mentioned earlier, is that for Wharton, individuals and their context are not separable. It is not, in my view, that Archer and Ellen are ‘too intelligent’ to free themselves from the ‘old order’; it is that the ‘old order’ is part of them and they are part of the old order. There is, in effect, no choice. This is the acute insight into the psychologies of the characters, psychologies shaped by their social context. This is what makes the novel tragic as there is that overwhelming sense of waste, of love wasted.
Other readers certainly found her re-creation of people in a place convincing. One wrote, ‘New York society and customs in the seventies are described with an accuracy that is almost uncanny; to read these pages is to live again.’ [Reviews, Norton ed., p.384]
Another reviewer wrote: ‘It is said that this generation devours everything but remembers nothing’ and proposed The Age of Innocence as a classic which would be remembered: ‘As a picture of the ‘upper classes’ in our metropolis as it stolidly solidified itself in the decade or so after the Civil War, the novel is curiously captivating; no one but Mrs. Wharton could have rendered the description so delicately exact. There is irony behind it all, but not the bitterness of scorn or contempt. It is an etching, not a caricature.’ [Ibid., p.390] This is a comment about Wharton’s tone and I agree. It is the sympathy which Wharton allows us to develop with her characters which makes the novel more than a social satire: it is not just about a society, it is about particular individuals who are bound up in that society, one which the previously quoted reviewer brilliantly describes as ‘stolidly solidified’ – that captures the sense of entrapment. Archer has no choice but to give up his love of Ellen and marry May. All three are inseparably bound up with place.
It is this idea of the Gordian Knot of great literature that I’d now like to develop. Let’s begin with character. In The Age of Innocence Wharton brilliantly re-invents fictional character. She moves a long way from the notion of character in the American Realist tradition. For Wharton, characters are not separable one from another. Identity is rather a function of multiple relationships and not simply with other ‘characters’. She expresses this idea in her fascinating work, The Writing of Fiction (1925): ‘the bounds of personality were not reproducible by a sharp black line, but that each of us flows imperceptibly into adjacent people and things.’ [EW, The Writing of Fiction (1925), p.7] Rather than being an independent, contained entity, character, for Wharton, spills out into ‘adjacent people and things’. This is expressed very well by Pamela Knights in her essay ‘Forms of Disembodiment’. She writes: ‘Readers soon discover that any observation about an individual character – about his or her consciousness, emotions, body, history or language – also entangles us in the collective experience of the group, expressed in the welter of trifles, the matrix of social knowledge, within and out of which Wharton’s subjects are composed’ [Pamela Knights, ‘Forms of Disembodiment: The Social Subject in The Age of Innocence’, The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, p.21]